In the past 15 years, the mobile telephone industry has grown by leaps and bounds. The market demand for mobile phone accessories such as faceplates, cases, chargers, and Bluetooth® headsets has also proliferated rapidly.
Since the explosion of Apple's iPhone® and its contribution to the phenomenon of app culture, companies large and small are trying to produce devices that facilitate and maximize the use and functionality for consumers and their smartphones. For example, one company has recently introduced a “Smartwatch” that connects to a smartphone and can display Twitter feeds, Facebook updates, SMS, among other things pulled from a smartphone. Other companies have produced devices that measure the energy you exert on a daily basis and send it to a smartphone, while also telling the time. Other devices may track user's daily activity and send the information to a smartphone application. Other devices that can play music and display text, the weather and other information from a phone have also been introduced.
These smart watches primarily serve as a complement to smartphones; for example, they display information such as incoming calls and can control smartphone applications. As a result, the growth of the smartphone market directly influences growth of the smart watch market. The smartphone installed base hence serves as the total available market for smart watches.
However, many of these fitness and health focused accessories are single purpose. Further, even though watch-like devices have attempted to bridge the mobile phone and consumer's informational needs but they are more or less “geek-like” gadgets. Therefore style-conscious consumers, particularly females, do not take advantages of these unfashionable looking smart watches, Bluetooth headsets, etc.
Similarly, in the past decade, Bluetooth headsets have transformed to more than just transmitting voice conversation. In addition to advancing digital signal processing and sound quality, many brands have also attempted to increase battery life, form factor, and design of its wireless headsets. Some headsets come with a mini display (usually one or two liner) integrated for displaying caller ID, SMS, phonebook, song title, etc.
It is also true that most fashion houses and jewelry makers do not have the technical know-how to efficiently integrate their fashion jewelry with digital accessories. If they try to do it at all, they must outsource or partner with engineering service firms and/or Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) to produce such a combination. Thus, none has been able to integrate Bluetooth headsets and wireless communication devices with jewelry and fashion accessories consumers enjoy wearing. It is believed that (1) the capability and technologies to miniaturize electronic and circuitry is possible today but keeping sufficient battery life increases the physical size of device proportionally and (2) other than the battery, the earbud and related components take up most of the real estate of the headset casing and industrial design. Nonetheless, it is a fact that most women and style conscious consumers do not like and want to wear today's Bluetooth headsets and wireless communications devices in the market today are appealing to primarily to geeks, gadget-lovers, and/or fitness fanatics.
Further, these smart watches and headsets are all individually engineered from scratch. This negatively impacts their cost and limits expansion of a full ‘line’ of accessories unless new devices are built in similar boxy form factors.
What may be needed are ways to hide the earbud or listening device so a wireless headset can seamlessly integrate with fashion accessories and jewelry. Furthermore, devices for wireless terminals may need to be integrated and incorporated in jewelry and fashion accessory design, so consumer's daily digital communication needs is infused with such devices and part of their fashion.